Posts Tagged → congress

Common Ground That’s More Like Quicksand

A writer in the Post speculates that the president and the new Congress might find some common ground, “ripe for deal-making” in the issue of education.

Of course there’s common ground!  When it comes to education a majority of congress critters on both sides of the aisle believe…

The way to improve education is through more and better standardized testing.

Charter schools are the magic path to improved learning (aka higher test scores), even if they use pretty much the same curriculum and teaching techniques as “regular” schools at the same or higher costs while selectively choosing their students.

Teachers are the one and only cause of bad schools (or at least the union members) and firing the “bad” ones while giving performance pay to a select group of the remaining will fix everything. Professional development for teachers? Sorry, too expensive.

And finally, schools that should educate students for their future using exactly the same structure they fondly remember from the previous century, maybe with a few computers and an interactive whiteboard added to make the classroom look high tech.

The fact that anyone believes “We need to fix No Child Left Behind.”, or that Bush’s train wreck of a law is even fixable, tells you where this “bipartisan effort” is heading.

Rep. George Miller, the outgoing House education chairman, is quoted in the story as saying, “The old days of defending the status quo have kind of evaporated over the last two years.”

That’s crap! The status quo is exactly the common ground when it comes to “deal-making” on federal control of American education, and it functions more like quicksand than a solid foundation.

Facebook Requires Congressional Oversight?

In the past few weeks I’ve read that some congress critters, along with a smattering of states Attorneys General, are calling for public hearings/investigations concerning privacy issues at Facebook.

Why?

In many ways this is just another in a long line of don’t-they-have-better-things-to-do, high profile, faux public outrages.

While I haven’t made much use of Facebook for much of anything, I do have an account and have some degree of concern about their seeming lack of concern for user security.

But do the screw-ups of a privately-owned company, whose product is largely recreational and which has little or no impact on America’s economic security, really merit the attention of our national legislature?

Really?

Isn’t this more an educational issue? One where people learn, sometimes the hard way, to take responsibility for their own digital imprint.

And about the larger community educating each other and banding together to pressure Facebook into making the changes they want? Or leaving and using other tools for socializing online.

Because no one with a Facebook account signed up for life and, although they don’t make it especially easy, it is still possible to quit.

Let’s face it, this isn’t the first time that a popular internet company has done something to upset a very noisy web minority and it won’t be the last.

However, that doesn’t mean they need to make a federal case out of it.

 

Hypocrisy Overload

Washington DC is commonly used as a metaphorical punching bag by a wide variety of critics, both in and out of politics, and that’s to be expected considering this is the national capital.

But once in a while there comes instances of massive hypocrisy spouted by critics that sound like something straight out of The Onion.

For example, this past Saturday a crowd of people (one much smaller than claimed by supporters) staged a protest on the mall in front of the Capitol.

Nothing unusual. The city gets dozens of manufactured events every year, and those of us who live in the DC area always know to check the papers to see what kind of mess they plan to make of travel in and out of the city.

This particular group was rallying against “big government”, “government spending”, “excessive taxation”, and an assortment of other whines that were in their script.

However, it seems one of their pet congress critters is unhappy with Metro, our local transportation system, saying they didn’t provide enough subway cars to get everyone to the demonstration on time.

A PUBLIC transportation system, paid for by an inadequate amount of TAXES, run by the GOVERNMENT didn’t live up to his high expectations.

Let’s face it, Metro is far from perfect, and the system has been deteriorating lately due to lack of support.

But overall they do a good job of not only transporting hundreds of thousands of locals every week but also millions of tourists who visit every year. And by all reports, ridership last Saturday was not much higher than most weekends this time of year.

So, if these people who hate government programs and their government-paid representative don’t like the public transportation system around here, and don’t like waiting on the platform like the rest of us, maybe they should either walk or take a cab.

Oh, yeah. That same fine representative, who is now demanding a GOVERNMENT investigation of Metro, thought that using private transit was a bad thing.

And then there’s another congress critter I ran across on some program who regurgitated what he called “the old line” about Washington being “100 square miles surrounded by reality”.

Obviously this clueless character has never made the very short trip from his cozy House chambers to Southeast DC. Or many parts of Northeast. Both well inside his 100 square miles.

Plenty of stark reality going on in those neighborhoods, reality that has NO representation in Congress and is largely ignored by most of the idiots like him working inside that irony-free zone of hypocrisy perched on Capitol Hill.